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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

How the Buddha got his wounds

On Monday Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were promising to safeguard the country's historic treasures. On Thursday they started shelling them. Luke Harding explains what changed their minds

Luke Harding
The Guardian, Saturday 3 March 2001

It had seemed like a good meeting. Sitting in one corner was Afghanistan's bearded foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel. On the sofa opposite, a delegation of western cultural experts who had flown to Kabul to discuss the preservation of Afghanistan's few remaining antiquities.

Over cups of green tea, Mutawakel smilingly assured the delegation that all was well. The Taliban, Afghanistan's fundamentalist rulers, had no intention of destroying what was left of the country's heritage, he said. This was at 5.30pm on Monday. Two hours later, however, Radio Sharia - the Taliban's official station - broadcast an announcement that would plunge Afghanistan into further isolation and provoke a major international outcry. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed spiritual leader, had issued a new decree: that all Afghanistan's ancient statues should be destroyed.

The decision was in line with Islamic law and had been taken following a gathering of the country's most senior religious leaders, he explained. "We were just blown away," said Brigitte Neubacher of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage (SPACH). "This came immediately after our one-and-a-half hour meeting. Whether the timing was deliberate or not we don't know. I am totally horrified."

By Thursday, Taliban fighters deep in the Hindu Kush mountains started putting Mullah Omar's edict into effect. They set about what was once Afghanistan's most famous tourist attraction - two enormous statues of Buddha, 38 and 55 metres high, carved into a cliff-face. Using tanks and rocket launchers they began to destroy the two works, which had survived since the second century AD.

The magnificent colossi were built in the remote and beautiful Bamiyan Valley - seven hours' drive from Kabul - 1,000 years before the arrival of Islam in Afghanistan. They were built by the flourishing Buddhist Kushan dynasty, which had grown rich from its strategic position on the Silk Road between China and Rome.

The statues were unique. They were visited by pilgrims from across Central Asia; tended by yellow-robed priests who lived in caves carved into the sandstone hillside; and decorated with exquisite frescoes. "The buddhas are absolutely spectacular. I have never seen anything like them in my life," one awed visitor to Bamiyan told me. The statues even outlasted an attack by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. But they have finally met their match in the Taliban.

In retrospect, the international community could have spotted the danger signals. Three weeks ago, Taliban officials allegedly broke into Kabul's bombed-out museum and destroyed around 50 objects of cultural significance, according to reports.

There was not, it has to be said, much left to destroy. Rival Afghan mujaheddin factions looted most of the museum's best pieces when they fought for control of the city in 1992. But a few things were still on display when I visited last October: a couple of friezes, a limestone Islamic bowl and a rather fetching statue of King Kanishka, who ruled Afghanistan 1,800 years ago.

One observer who recently managed to peer through the locked museum's windows spotted some white marks on King Kanishka's enormous royal feet, suggesting the already headless statue had been hit by a hammer. "We don't know how great the damage is. We weren't allowed into the museum to verify the reports," one member of the SPACH delegation said.

The Taliban's decision to destroy the few relics that managed to survive 20 years of war and Soviet occupation can only be explained by recent political events. In February, the UN imposed fresh sanctions on Afghanistan. The Taliban's office in New York was closed down by the United States, a country obsessed with capturing the Afghanistan-based Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden. Within the Taliban, a dialogue of sorts had been going on. Moderates, such as the Taliban's culture minister Abdul Rahman Hotaki, advocated a degree of co-operation with the west. But after the most recent wave of sanctions Mullah Omar appears to have concluded that a policy of engagement was entirely pointless. Instead, he has thumbed his nose at the international community. "All we are breaking are stones," he shrugged. "I don't care about anything but Islam."

Since the Taliban swept into Kabul four years ago, imposing the world's most extreme brand of Islam, portrayal of the human image has been forbidden. Painters, for example, are now confined to depicting landscapes; Kabul's art gallery is hung with innocuous Victorian pastorals. In September 1998, a renegade Taliban commander blew off the head of the smaller Bamiyan buddha using dynamite. He also fired rockets at the large buddha's groin, damaging the luxurious folds of the statue's dress.

But the Taliban then decided to take a more pragmatic view of Afghanistan's pre-Islamic past. In July 1999 Mullah Omar issued a decree that said the Bamiyan buddhas should be preserved. There were, he pointed out, no Buddhists left in Afghanistan to worship them. But he added: "The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected."

Then, over another cup of green tea four months ago, Hotaki assured me that the Taliban had no intention of damaging the statues. To suggest as much was "foreign propaganda", he said. Sadly, though, the rumours have proved all too true.

The Bamiyan valley, with its serene mountain views and pastel colours, is also an unwelcome reminder to the Taliban of their own vulnerability. Opposition fighters from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance seized the valley last month and were dislodged only after a massive battle. The Taliban have now sealed the valley and have rejected all requests by foreign observers to visit.

It is not just the buddhas that face annihilation: 20 tin trunks that may contain the Kabul museum's celebrated Bactrian treasures are currently stored in the vaults of the presidential palace and the Taliban's culture ministry. They have not been opened, so no one is sure what they contain. The only certainty is that after Monday's edict, they are likely to be lost to the world for ever.

"I consider myself a friend of Afghanistan. I have spent 15 years trying to help the country," one western cultural expert said this week. "But it is becoming an island of madness."